There was a claw hammer in the desk drawer. Oscar-although he was at first too energetic and it seemed that he would fail-succeeded in hammering the chair back together. She obliged him by sitting in it. Her back was bathed in afternoon sunshine.

She said: "You must think me really quite ridiculous." =

He said: "Oh, no, not at all." is

She held out her hand, received the handkerchief he offered, and blew her nose. She was anointed with a blue ink smudge. It sat right on the tip of her nose. "Am I right to say you guessed the reason for my tears?"

But he had guessed nothing. He felt himself to be too big, too tall, too awkward. She was so condensed and gathered. There was nothing

Oscar and Lucinda

superfluous about her. He squatted with his back against the opposite wall. His legs too long and thin, untidy as a heap of unsawn firewood.

"No," he said, "no, really, I have no idea."

Her face changed subtly. You could not say what had happened-a diminution of the lower lip, a flattening of the cheek, a narrowing of the eye. But there was no ambiguity in her intention. She had withdrawn her trust from him abruptly. "If you have no idea," she said, "how can you not think me ridiculous?"

"Because you do not have a 'ridiculous' character."

They looked at each other and saw each other change from combative stranger to familiar friend and back again, not staying one thing long enough for certainty. She had velvety green irises of extraordinary beauty. Her eye-whites were laced with tangled filaments of red.

"And are you curious?" she asked, pulling and pushing, challenging him even while she promised to confide. "About the reason for my tears? Are you curious a little bit?" He was curious, of course he was, but he had a lover's curiosity and he feared what she might say. He imagined the tears were somehow connected to the fat letters she left lying on her marble mantelpiece. He imagined they were produced by Dennis Hasset. He was curious. He was not curious at all. He had a lover's selfishness, was grateful for the intimacy the tears had made possible, was resentful of what they seemed to threaten.

They looked at each other until the look became a stare and both of them lost their nerve at once.

"Yes," he said, "of course I am curious."

He wet the corner of the handkerchief again and tenderly removed the smudge from her nose. She tilted her head a little and closed her eyes.

She told him how the men, her employees, had offered him a fellowship they had denied to her. Her mouth changed while she told it. It became small. He was aware of the cutting edges of her lower teeth.

He was sorry for her. He was a fool, and had been party to a great unkindness. He was sorry, so very sorry, and he said so. He was also privately elated that the tears were not to do with Dennis Hasset at all, and although he tried not to grin, he could not help it.

"Well," he said, "you should know why I came bounding after you."

"Not to dry my tears."

"Are you curious?"

"Oh," she smiled. "I am curious, of course." — ; '

He acknowledged her irony with a bow of his head. "I chased after you to tell you I had never seen anything, in all my life/

The Private Softness of Her Skin

quite as splendid as your works." He frowned., r.

Lucinda coloured, but it was not clear what she felt.

He pressed his clenched hands beneath his knees.

She said: "Oh dear."

He sighed and said: "Yes."

"Yes what?"

But he had only said "yes" in response to what he hoped "Oh dear" might mean, and he was not brave enough to be explicit. "Perhaps," he said, picking up his battered hat from the floor, "we should take tea." He was thinking of the Café Francasi, a place with marble tables.

"I will show you," she said, standing and smoothing down her velvet skirts. What this meant was most uncertain.

He did not ask her "what" or "where" but followed her as she left her office. His mind was out of focus at the edges, sharp at the centre of its lens. Her walk was unexpectedly jaunty, crisp, clear, echoing. On the landing she opened a door marked "Acclimatization Society of New South Wales."

Oscar thought: Mr Smith.

"Gone," she said, tapping the sign. "Vamoosed. Mine now." She unlocked the door and swung it open. He waited for her to enter, but she would not. She stepped to one side and made a gesture like a theatre usher. They collided and tangled in their own politeness. "Look," she said impatiently, "just look." What she asked him to look at was Mr Flood's "proty-type"; that construction which, only a second before, had occupied the crystal centre of her life. But when she stood beside Mr Hopkins in the doorway she no longer saw the cleverness of Mr Flood with his singed, hairy arms and his dividers and tables predicting "actual shrinkage." She saw only a dumpy little structure with a pitched roof like a common outhouse.

"You may approach," she said drily. "It is not sacred. It is merely," she said, imitating Mr Flood's pinched nasal tones, "a 'prory-type.' "

But Oscar did not see as Lucinda imagined. As the dust danced in the luminous tunnel of the western sun, he saw not a dumpy little structure, not a common outhouse either, but light, ice, spectra. He saw glass as those who love it perceive it. He understood that it was the gross material most nearly like the soul, or spirit (or how he would wish the soul or spirit to be), that it was free of imperfection, of dust, rust, that it was an avenue for glory. He did not see an outhouse. He saw a tiny church with dust dancing around it like microscopic angels. It was as clean and pure and free from vanity. It was at once so beautiful and yet so… decent. The light shone

Oscar and Lucinda

through its transparent, unadorned skin and cast colours on the distempered office walls as glorious as the stained glass windows of a cathedral.

"Oh dear/' he said, "oh dearie me."

When he turned towards her, Lucinda saw his face had gone pink. His mouth had become quite small, as if the thing which made him smile was a sherbet sweetmeat that must be sucked in secret.

He said: "I am most extraordinarily happy."

This statement made him appear straighter, taller. His hair was on fire around the edges. She felt a pleasant prickling along the back of her neck. She thought: This is dangerous territory you are in.

He was light, not substantial. He stood before her scratching his head and grinning and she was grinning back.

"You have made a kennel for God's angels."

Whoa, she thought.

She thought: This is how the devil looks, with a sweet heart-shaped face and violinist's hands.

"I know God's angels do not inhabit kennels." He stepped into the room (she followed him) and crouched beside the tiny glass-house. It was six foot long with all its walls and roof of glass, the floor alone in timber. "But if they did, this surely is the kennel they would demand."

"Please," she said.

"But there is nothing irreligious," he said. "How could we have a sense of humour if our Lord did not?"

She smiled. She thought: Oh dear.

"Do you not imagine," he said, "that our Lord laughs together with his angels?" She thought: I am in love. How extraordinary.

"How could God, who is all-knowing, not understand the foundation the joke is built on? I mean, that here is something the size of a wolfhound's kennel which, thanks to your industry, is a structure of such beauty and joy as to be a habitation fit for His angels." He stood still now, having, while he spoke, danced like a brolga around the little glass building. He held out his arms as if he might embrace her and then brought them back across his chest and hugged himself and hunched his back a little.